1980s
bruce.dessau
Alex Turner says he wants to sound like 50 Cent. Adele has recently been recording with Wiz Khalifa. There really are very few musical barriers to be demolished these days. But 59-year-old Elvis Costello goes hip hop? Now that's a turn up for the books that shows that, not far off 40 years of making music, the man out of time still has the ability to shock.Calm down. Wise Up Ghost is not exactly Kanye. This stylistically mixed album was recorded in late-night sessions with skilful all-rounders The Roots, who Elvis bonded with on Jimmy Fallon's chat show when they aired their Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
In the late Eighties one of the most sonically unhinged bands of all time came together in East London. Terminal Cheesecake caused few commercial waves but gathered a devoted coterie of fans for their unholy racket at pummelling concerts. Their sound was initially crunching riff-rock smeared with head-frying psychedelia and deranged electronic effects but throughout a career of five albums – Johnny Town-Mouse (1988), VCL (1989), Angels in Pigtails (1990), Pearlesque Kings of the Jewmost (1992) and King of All the Spaceheads (1994) – they gradually drifted into monstrous exercises in marijuana Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Influencing Alfonso Cuaron's Gravity, director Andrei Konchalovsky’s underrated marvel Runaway Train is finally available on crisp Blu-ray: think masculine philosophy meets Alaskan wilderness in an existential thriller as exciting today as it was in 1985.Two convicts – Oscar “Manny” Manheim (Voight in an Oscar-nominated role) and the beautiful, irritating Buck McGeehy (Eric Roberts, also nominated for an Oscar) – flee an Alaskan high security prison. Only moments ahead of vindictive warden Ranken (John P Ryan), Manny chooses an ominous locomative (the forboding, box-like powerhouse EMD GP7, a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
They’ve served BBC Four well, these dramas about the private lives of the stars. From writers to comics, presenters to chefs, the secret traumas of yesteryear’s celebs have entertained and enlightened. And, if we’re honest, embellished. Now that the channel has given up making drama, viewers will have to get their scripted gossip from alternative sources. In Burton and Taylor, the run concluded by peeping through the curtain at two of the most public private lives of all.William Ivory’s script dropped in on the famous romance long after its embers had officially flickered out. This was 1983, Read more ...
Matt Parker
In both a personal and literary sense, Grant Hart has been to hell and back. While the 52-year-old Minnesotan is still best known as the drummer and songwriting contributor behind legendary US punk band Hüsker Dü, his fourth solo album, The Argument, is a bold adaptation of John Milton's Paradise Lost that could finally see him recognised as an artist in his own right. And it's about time.For better or worse, Hart has spent three decades being cast as the yin to Hüsker Dü frontman Bob Mould's yang. In contrast to Mould's direct, hardcore-influenced compositions, it was Hart that brought Read more ...
ellin.stein
Christened the Blues Brothers, Elwood and Jake’s first public appearance was as the warm-up act Lorne Michaels used to put the studio audience in a receptive mood before the show started. The audience became so warmed up that in April 1978, Michaels put the Blues Brothers on the actual broadcast, backed up by the SNL band. A contract with Atlantic Records, the label of several of the artists the Brothers emulated, materialised in short order. Belushi and Aykroyd found themselves in a dreamlike state where the slightest creative whim could be realised as a viable commercial product (indeed, it Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe's twelfth studio album sounds strangely familiar. I thought for a moment they had already released an album with the same title and then I realised that I was thinking of the Tennant/Johnny Marr/Bernard Sumner collaboration Electronic. There is definitely an air of deja vu about Electric though. But in a good way. Sorry, make that a great way.This is certainly an improvement on their last album, Elysium. If that was all about end-of-an-era melancholy, there are no such comedowns here. From the Moroder-ish opener "Axis" through to the forthcoming single "Vocal Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Blondie are one of a handful of bands capable of producing a set list which renders rational critical argument all but obsolete. If they play the hits and they play them straight and true, there’s not really much to complain about. Last night in Edinburgh the six-piece line-up (half original members, half relative newbies) played (most of) the hits, and well, but let’s break it down to specifics.Five things you want to see at a Blondie concert1. Debbie Harry. A vision in peach with voice and sass intact, she remains a tough-but-tender front woman par excellence with charisma to burn. 2. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Giorgio Moroder: Schlagermoroder Volume 1 1966-1975 / On the Groove Train Volume 1 1975-1993 / On the Groove Train Volume 2 1974-1985 / Son of my FatherSo far, this year has been good for Giorgio Moroder. He’s been integral to Daft Punk’s world-conquering Random Access Memories. “I Feel Love”, the timeless, pulsing synth-dance fantasia he fashioned for Donna Summer, opened the Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra. At once, he’s evocative of a particular era and his influence is shaping the contemporary. The voyage through these seven CDs (three doubles and a single) shows how hard he’s Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: Scared to Get Happy – A Story of Indie-pop 1980-1989It’s a good thing this box set has the hedge-betting sub-title A Story of Indie-pop. Making the definitive statement on a whole decade of pop’s undergrowth is probably impossible, but being so equivocal from the off sets up Scared to Get Happy as not bold enough to nail its colours to the mast.Compiling and licensing the material on Scared to Get Happy must have been a nightmare. Spread across the five CDs of this first large-scale collection of the era are 134 tracks, beginning with The Wild Swans’s 1982 single “ Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Doug Lucie's signature spikiness remains intact, and then some, in the Defibrillator production of Hard Feelings, which is sure to pack out west London's tiny Finborough and might well be a candidate for a transfer. Telling of the various meltdowns, betrayals, and shifting alliances in a shared house in Brixton while riots rage just beyond the front door (the year is 1981), the play serves as a reminder of the invaluable prickliness offered up by Lucie, who takes the measure of his Oxford colleagues and comes away as aghast as an audience is likely to be enthralled. The house belongs to Read more ...
bruce.dessau
It says something about the commodification of modern music that Scottish poppets Camera Obscura are probably best known for "French Navy" because it is used by wine company Echo Falls on the sponsored intros to Come Dine With Me. It is a brilliantly romantic rush of a song and I tweeted that it was a shame it was linked to selling booze. Comedian/fan Josie Long, not one to condone corporate sell-outs, responded "I just think 'I hope this means you are funded enough to write your beautiful songs!'"Well, maybe the cash-injection has helped, because the Glaswegian band has returned after four Read more ...